Shing-Tung Yau

Shing-Tung Yau
Shing-Tung Yau
丘成桐
Born	April 4, 1949; Shantou, China
Alma mater	Chinese University of Hong Kong; University of California, Berkeley (PhD)
Known for	Analysis and geometry of the Plateau problem and minimal surfaces; Bernstein's problem for maximal surfaces; Bogomolov–Miyaoka–Yau inequality; Donaldson–Uhlenbeck–Yau theorem; Frankel conjecture; Geometry of positive scalar curvature; Gradient estimates for partial differential equations; Minkowski problem; Monge–Ampère equation; Omori−Yau maximum principle; Positive mass theorem; Resolution of the Calabi conjecture and construction of Calabi–Yau manifolds; Resolution of the Willmore conjecture in the non-embedded case; SYZ conjecture and mirror symmetry; Thomas–Yau conjecture;
Spouse	Yu-yun Kuo
Children	Michael Yau, Isaac Chiu
Awards	John J. Carty Award (1981); Veblen Prize (1981); Fields Medal (1982); Crafoord Prize (1994); National Medal of Science (1997); Wolf Prize (2010); Shaw Prize (2023)
	Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	Tsinghua University; Harvard University ; University of California, San Diego ; Stanford University ; Stony Brook University ; Institute for Advanced Study
Thesis	On the Fundamental Group of Compact Manifolds of Non-Positive Curvature (1971)
Doctoral advisor	Shiing-Shen Chern
Doctoral students	Richard Schoen (Stanford, 1977); Robert Bartnik (Princeton, 1983); Mark Stern (Princeton, 1984); Huai-Dong Cao (Princeton, 1986); Gang Tian (Harvard, 1988); Jun Li (Stanford, 1989); Wanxiong Shi (Harvard, 1990); Lizhen Ji (Northeastern, 1991); Kefeng Liu (Harvard, 1993); Mu-Tao Wang (Harvard, 1998); Chiu-Chu Melissa Liu (Harvard, 2002); Valentino Tosatti (Harvard, 2009);

Shing-Tung Yau (Chinese: 丘成桐; pinyin: Qiū Chéngtóng; Jyutping: jau1 sing4 tung4; born April 4, 1949) is a Chinese American mathematician and educator. He is the First ethnic Chinese Fields medalist and director of the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center at Tsinghua University and professor emeritus at Harvard University. Until 2022, Yau was the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard, at which point he moved to Tsinghua.

Yau was born in Shantou in 1949, moved to Hong Kong at a young age, and then moved to the United States in 1969. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982, in recognition of his contributions to partial differential equations, the Calabi conjecture, the positive energy theorem, and the Monge–Ampère equation. Yau is considered one of the major contributors to the development of modern differential geometry and geometric analysis. The impact of Yau's work are also seen in the mathematical and physical fields of convex geometry, algebraic geometry, enumerative geometry, mirror symmetry, general relativity, and string theory, while his work has also touched upon applied mathematics, engineering, and numerical analysis.